The Tax Gap

Floor Speech

THE TAX GAP -- (Senate - March 11, 2008)

Mr. MCCONNELL. Mr. President, after reviewing the budget proposed by the other side of the aisle, one thing is clear: the people who wrote it were more interested in growing the size and scope of Washington spending than in growing the American family's budget. But Americans expect more from government than a $1.2 trillion tax hike and billions of dollars in new spending, especially in these difficult economic times.

But even with a giant tax hike, the new spending in this budget isn't really accounted for. Democrats say they want to ``pay for'' massive spending by--among other gimmicks--closing what they like to refer to as the ``tax gap.'' This is the gap that exists between what people actually owe in taxes and what they pay.

Well, we need only look back at last year to see that Congress hasn't been very successful in attempting to close the ``tax gap''. In 2007, Congress passed the Democrat budget resolution which promised to reduce the tax gap by $300 billion over 5 years. Unfortunately, this promise was never followed up on with actual legislation to make it law and no progress was made.

In other words, Democrats are counting on a direct deposit from a job they never completed. That doesn't work in the family budget, and it shouldn't work in the Federal budget.

While Congress did enact a few--a few--of the tax gap proposals included in the President's 2008 budget, those amounted to only a tiny fraction of the tax gap, hardly enough to rely upon for offsetting the billions of dollars in the new spending Democrats are proposing. As the ranking member of the Finance Committee reminded the Senate yesterday, the promises didn't come close to matching reality. During the first year of this Democrat majority the enacted tax-gap provisions amounted to two-tenths of 1 percent of the tax gap.

Two-tenths of 1 percent; that is 99.8 percent short of the promised revenue. That is hundreds of billions of dollars short of the revenue they projected to pay for their new Washington spending.

That is not even close, not even in the same ballpark.

There are serious disagreements between the parties on taxes. The other side supports higher rates. We want to keep tax rates low. But we should all agree that people have a responsibility to pay what they lawfully owe.

Over and over again the Democrat majority has failed to enact any sort of serious and substantial strategy for closing the tax gap. And as a result, their numbers simply don't add up. Faulty numbers don't pay the bills, and funds that aren't collected won't shrink the deficit.

So if the budget written by our friends across the aisle is going to rely on these funds to balance the budget, we need to think again, or the family budget is going to shrink to make up for the red ink in Washington's budget.

I yield the floor.

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